Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings. Francis Augustus MacNutt
used both spellings indifferently, especially during the earlier years of his life.
This family ranked among the nobility of Seville and mention is found of the confirmation by Alfonso XI. of Guillen de Las Casas in the office of regidor of the city in 1318. This same Guillen became Alcalde Mayor of Seville, and when he died his body was buried in one of the chapels of the cathedral. His son, Alfonso, is stated in the chronicles of Don Juan II. (1409) to have been appointed by the Infante, Don Fernando, to the lieutenancy of Castillo de Priego, “because he was a valiant man who could hold it well.” The names of Guillen and Bartolomé are of frequent recurrence in the annals of the family, whose members constantly occupied the honourable offices of judge, alcalde mayor, and captain, using the title of Don and intermarrying with the most illustrious families of Andalusia.
According to indications equivalent to proofs in the absence of any positive record, from such respectable forebears descended Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, who was born in Seville, in 1474. He himself speaks of Seville as his native city, and the popular tradition, which fixes the ancient suburb of Triana as his birthplace, was recognised in 1859 by the municipality of Seville assigning the name of Calle del Procurador to one of the streets of Triana, in honour of the Bishop, whose proudest title was Protector (or Procurador) General of the Indians.
In his voluminous writings, which teem with [pg 3] information about the men and events of his times, the references to his own family history are infrequent and imperfect, so that from his own records of his life, very little is to be gleaned concerning it. His father's name is variously given by different writers as Alonso, Antonio, and Francisco, while he himself states1 that he was named Pedro, thus contradicting all his biographers from Remesal, who was the first, down to Don Antonio Fabié, whose admirable Vida y Escritos, published in 1879, was the last important contribution on this interesting subject. Zuñiga, in his Discurso de Ortices, assumed that Alonso de las Casas and Beatriz Maraver y Cegarra of Triana were the parents of Fray Bartholomew, but in the Anales de Sevilla, a later work, Francisco is given as the father's name. Neither Llorente nor Gutierrez, who has followed him, gives any authority for his affirmation that the father's name was Antonio, while Quintana and Fabié accept Remesal2 and name the father Francisco.
The genealogy of the family furnished me by the dean of the Royal College of Heralds in Madrid shows the descent of Fray Bartholomew through his frather, named Francisco, from Alonso de Las Casas, “Señor de Gomez Cardeña, Veinticuatro de Seville, la Villa de Priego” in 1409, and his wife, Maria Fernandez Marmolejo. The children of this couple were Guillen, Isabel, Juan, Pedro, and Francisco, who is described in the genealogy as the father of Bartholomew. Pedro, whom Fray Bartholomew mentions as his father, is described as Dean of Seville, in which case his ecclesiastical state would exclude matrimony and legitimate issue.
Fabié affirms that in several passages of his writings Fray Bartholomew confirms the assertion of those authors who have designated his father as Francisco, but he does not indicate the whereabouts of these passages nor have I, in my unaided researches, succeeded in finding them. The descendants of the original founder of the family had multiplied and, by the close of the fifteenth century, were divided into many prolific branches, hence the difficulty of identifying the unimportant father of an extraordinarily important son is not wonderful. Las Casas himself may be reasonably assumed to have known his own father's name and we must conclude, in view of his assertion, that all other authorities, including the Royal College of Heralds, are wrong, and that not Francisco, but a Pedro de Las Casas, who was not however Dean of Seville, was the immediate progenitor of the illustrious Bishop of Chiapa.
The scarcity of positive information concerning his immediate family is equalled by the paucity of trustworthy details of the first twenty-eight years of Fray Bartholomew's life. He completed his studies and obtained the degree of licentiate in law at the University of Salamanca, the most celebrated in Spain, and which ranked high amongst the great seats of learning in Europe at that time. Jurisprudence was divided into the branches of Roman law as interpreted by the school of Bologna, and of canon law, the principles of which were interwoven with the common practice, whose severer tendencies they somewhat tempered. The precepts of Aristotle as interpreted by scholastics formed the basis of philosophical studies, and the Thomistic doctrine was taught by professors of the Dominican Order.
It has been judiciously observed that in that age of growing absolutism, both spiritual and temporal, only a skilful Thomistic scholar could have discerned the limits to the legitimate exercise of the royal authority which Las Casas so clearly perceived and so boldly defined in the very presence of the autocratic sovereigns of Spain.
Grammar, ethics, physics, and the branches of learning necessary to complete the education of a young man of his social position and mental capacity, were doubtless embraced in his course of study. His use of the Latin tongue was fluent, though his style has been criticised as cumbersome and wanting in elegance; certainly his writings abound in diffuse generalities, a multiplicity of repetitions, and a vast array of citations from Scripture and the classics which render his unexpurgated manuscripts wearisome enough to modern readers. He shared the defects of most of his contemporaries in this respect and followed the fashion common in his times. The training he received in the Spanish schools and the University, and which he [pg 6] afterwards perfected—as will be seen—by the studies he resumed after his profession in the Dominican Order, rendered formidable as an advocate one whom nature had endowed with a rare gift of eloquence, a passionate temperament, and a robust physical constitution which seems to have been immune to the ills and fatigues that assail less favoured mortals. Gines de Sepulveda, whose forensic encounter with Las Casas was one of the academic events of the sixteenth century, described his adversary in a letter to a friend as “most subtle, most vigilant, and most fluent, compared with whom Homer's Ulysses was inert and stammering.”
The father of Las Casas accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to America and acquired profitable interests in the island of Hispaniola. He returned to Spain in 1496, bringing with him an Indian lad whom he sent as a present to his son, who was then a student at Salamanca.
Bartholomew's ownership of this Indian boy was brief, owing to Queen Isabella's intense displeasure when she learned that Columbus had brought, and permitted to be brought back Indians, as slaves. Nothing sufficed to appease the Queen's indignation that the Admiral should thus dispose of her new subjects without her leave and authority, and a royal order was published from Granada, where the court then was, commanding, under pain of death, that all those who had brought Indians to Spain as slaves should send them back to America. When Francisco de Bobadilla was sent in 1500 to Hispaniola to supersede Columbus as Governor, all [pg 7] these Indians returned with him and Las Casas himself states, “Mine was of the number.”
Thus strangely is the future apostle of freedom first introduced to our notice in the guise of a slave-holder, constrained by a royal edict to surrender his human property.
Upon his return from Salamanca to Seville Las Casas found himself, through his father's relations with Columbus, in daily intercourse with the men whose voyages and discoveries were thrilling Europe. Amongst these navigators was his uncle Francisco de Peñulosa, and it was but natural that his eager temperament should catch the adventurous fever which prevailed throughout Spain and notably in Andalusia. Salucchi, in his Latin treatise on Hebrew coins, says that Las Casas accompanied his father on the second voyage of Columbus in 1493 and brought back the Indian slave himself. Llorente, who has been followed by several modern writers, asserts that his first voyage to America was made with Columbus on his third expedition. He deduces this conclusion from a statement at the close of the Thirty Propositions which Las Casas addressed to the Royal India Council in 1547 and from a sentence in the First Motive of his Ninth Remedy which he presented to the Emperor in 1542. The first of these passages reads “Thus, most illustrious Sirs, have I thought since forty-nine years, during which I have witnessed evil-doings in America and since thirty-four years that I have studied law.” The passage merely refers to Columbus having [pg 8] permitted certain Spaniards who had rendered important services during his voyage to bring back each an Indian and concludes, “And I obtained one.”